Friday 1 November 2013 08.48 EDT
First published on Friday 1 November 2013 08.48 EDT

I first played Proteus two years ago – at GameCity of course. Its developer, Ed Key, had left traditional mainstream game development and was trying something entirely new. He had a small stand in the tent on Nottingham's main square – his business card was an acorn with his email address scrawled on it.

Something about the game's chunky, luxuriously coloured visuals caught my eye – they took me back to my childhood, to old Atari and Commodore 64 games, when digital landscapes were minimalistic and subjective – like stark impressionist paintings.

I sat down and Key popped a headset on me. "You have to listen to the music," he said gently. And I did, because of course David Kanaga's score is an enormous part of this seemingly formless, graceful experience. You are on an island, procedurally generated just for you.

There are creatures here, and clusters of trees shedding pink leaves into the wind; there are remnants of civilisation; little stone circles and strange statues. It feels folkloric, like at any moment Christina Rossetti's goblin market could march by:

Backwards up the mossy glenTurn'd and troop'd the goblin men,With their shrill repeated cry,"Come buy, come buy."When they reach'd where Laura wasThey stood stock still upon the moss,Leering at each other,Brother with queer brother;Signalling each other,Brother with sly brother.One set his basket down,One rear'd his plate;One began to weave a crownOf tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown(Men sell not such in any town);One heav'd the golden weightOf dish and fruit to offer her:"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry.

There are seasons, too, though you may never experience them if you don't learn the island's generative secrets. For the most part, you wander the land, learning how the soundtrack bends and wilts to each new area. For some, Proteus is a sound tool, an interactive musical odyssey; something The Orb may have made if the technology had existed in the nineties. It seemed something that we'd only ever see on PC or Mac.

But earlier this year, after Proteus was released on Steam, Key was approached by Curve Studios about the possibility of creating a PlayStation 3 and Vita version. It wasn't something Key had considered, but Curve had spoken to Shahid Ahmad, Sony's indie guru, and he seemed interested. Sony is very interested in these experimental things nowadays, so the project was green lit.

Now here is Proteus – a thoughtful experiment, a meditation on place and nature available on a major console and a major handheld. Curve has cleverly added new features, such as interaction with the rear touchscreen and a Vita motion mode where you can look around the Proteus environment by moving the device itself.

"The new stuff is subtle but I'm really happy with it," says Key. "The motion-sensor camera mode, activated by tapping the L button on the Vita, is really neat – almost like VR without the mask or the nausea. I was so happy to see this crazy trick done with it.

"It's also possible to create location and date-based islands, both of which generate a random seed and then build an island from that, with a chance of about 10-15 different 'wild' things happening to it. Some of these are subtle and some aren't ... It's more about uniqueness and permanence and interesting dice-rolls than anything else. At one point the location-based islands were being discussed as if they would somehow take real-world elements and mix them in, but I'll leave it to someone else to make a Proteus/Geoguesser mash-up …"

For Key, one of the hardest elements of the conversion process was including trophies – a potentially mood-breaking concession to console gaming conventions. "I actually designed the whole set of trophies about four times," says Key. "It was very weird to do and I still flinch when the trophy notification pops up – pling! – but the only solution to that is to play without notifications enabled.

"The other main headache is that it breaks a fundamental design rule of Proteus: no text after the title screen – except the options screen. I tried to make them fairly cryptic, and the text is all 'sampled' from various books and other media that were important to us whilst making Proteus so there's a kind of oblique 'director's commentary' aspect. For some of them, I took some cues from psychogeography and tried to force the player to take unusual paths on the island. Videogames need more psychogeography."

Brilliantly, the trailer for the game actually uses a slice of Key's own psychogeography – it follows him on a walk near his home in Broughton-in-Furness (although Key actually spent parts of his childhood in Kendal and Wiltshire, experiences that also shaped the look and feel of the game).

"The film-makers, Rich and Lauren of Stray Dog Video, are friends of Curve's PR and marketing guy, Rob, and I'd always wanted to make a crazy live-action trailer, so we got talking about ideas," says Key. "They came up with a pitch and a storyboard after we knocked around a few initial concepts. The furthest outdoor location, Devoke Water, is only five miles from home, and the bus scene was shot driving around Kendal.

"It was a crazy battle against the weather, and perhaps even more against despair in the face of worsening forecasts, but in the end we shot almost the whole thing in one day. I'm incredibly happy with how well-received it has been. I enjoyed a certain person at the launch drinks with Curve saying, 'So did you build that stone circle?'"

Proteus is not a game, a few people insist. In some ways they're right, but in most they are wrong. Because as humans we gamify everything – it is how we interact with the world. When we explore a new place in real life, we set ourselves parameters and limits: I'll just get to that corner and head back; I have to make it to the brow of that hill. These are rudimentary game mechanics. When we fall in love, we are at the mercy of conflicting game systems – the natural desire is to show your hand, to go all in, express everything. But instead you need to quietly build XP, to learn and to work out in what ways your systems conflict or attune with your partner's. All of life is about finding a place or a person and learning their rules, however subtle, however arcane.

Proteus is not about love of course - or at least not obviously. It does, however, explore some of the same ideas as the traditional pastoral romance. In the Elizabethan era there was a fascination with the idea of the rural idyll as something magical and replenishing, and the Proteus environments are fecund with magic; it glistens at the edges of your vision, it sparkles above the trees and through the glades. It is there in the ambience, it drifts through the soundscape like pollen. Proteus renders into digital life, the isle of the Temptest, Shakespeare's pastoral vision of redemption, love and supernatural longing. From Caliban's famous speech:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.Sometimes a thousand twangling instrumentsWill hum about mine ears, and sometime voicesThat, if I then had waked after long sleep,Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,The clouds methought would open and show richesReady to drop upon me that, when I waked,I cried to dream again.

You don't always get that in console games.

• Proteus is available now on PC and Mac via Steam, and on PS3 and PS Vita via the PLayStation store